


to talk you home

by mimosaeyes



Category: The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Post-Series, but hopefully subtle and moving not melodramatic, letting Foggy grieve albeit without real closure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 15:27:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11854422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: The world teeters over the edge while he sits in a room full of strangers and fluorescent lighting.Or: Foggy moves between grief and hope.





	to talk you home

**Author's Note:**

> Claire’s “there was no talking him down” line made it sound like suicide-by-vigilantism. This title alludes instead to Foggy keeping a kind of emotional vigil, as though it would bring Matt back. Based on Talk Me Home by Stonefox.

Afterwards — in the hours of nothingness, in the days when time leaves him behind — like a record that skips, his thoughts grind down to those last few moments.

Foggy brought him the suit.

Foggy called him his family (again; like always; for the last time).

Matt never walked back in through that door.

 

 

 

It is awkward and tense, waiting there in the precinct, with only the dispatch for updates. A room full of people thankfully too caught up in everything else that’s going on to think too much about who knows who, who knows whose secrets, who each of them is there for, or because of. Shifty looks askance. Furrowed brows. A lot of pacing, and still more sighs. 

At some point Foggy remembers getting the hysterical urge to laugh at just how transparent it all seems, how closely the whole situation is teetering on the edge of irremediable.

He hears dispatch yelling, all static and barely contained panic, for paramedics, for backup, for everyone to get clear. He doesn’t hear the crash. The thunder of it, the finality. 

The world teeters over the edge while he sits in a room full of strangers and fluorescent lighting.

 

 

 

None of the others look at them as they trail back in. They hug like people falling into place, right where they belong. They take up their spots, leaning against tables, eyes glazed over with weariness. There’s a dread that’s been sitting in the pit of his stomach, and now it reaches up a tendril and twists inside him.

And suddenly Karen is crying into his shirt, her shoulders heaving and the damp warmth of her tears spreading over his shoulder. Foggy holds out longer than she does. He doesn’t even blink; his eyes start to smart but he watches that empty doorway, willing Matt to turn up — covered in dust and rubble, bloody and gasping and groaning but with every pained breath, so wonderfully alive.

Only he won’t, because it’s finally happened. His best friend is dead, and Foggy even got him his suit for the burial.

He closes his eyes. He hugs Karen tighter. He starts to cry — to grieve.

That talkshow personality, Trish, pulls away from Jessica Jones. Distantly Foggy hears her ask, “Wasn’t Daredevil with you?” and then quietly, a long moment later, “What happened to the lawyer?” 

Trish comes to stand next to Karen, who lifts her face and meets her gaze. Trish glances at Jessica, then down at her hands. Karen starts shaking her head and sobbing anew, and before he knows it, she’s hugging Trish instead, and when Trish says, “I’m so sorry,” it’s more than mere condolence.

Foggy turns to Claire and her palms are together like she’s praying. Later, he will learn that she prayed there, too; prayed while a building fell down on the man she wouldn’t allow herself to love.

 

 

 

He holds out for two whole days on going to Matt’s apartment. It’s the same irrationality as watching that door: here is the last place he might find him. Here is the last place there is to look, before there are no more places Matt could be except gone.

The spare key shakes in his hand and one of the light bulbs blows as soon as Foggy flicks the switch (he knows just where it is). He knows where Matt keeps spare bulbs, too; and he knows that up until recently, those spares were kept out of consideration for him.

But Foggy doesn’t replace the bulb, and he doesn’t pick up the first aid kit he finds near the wall, its contents spilling out as though it was shoved off the table. He walks through the kitchen area, the lounge; he holds his breath before he slides open the bedroom door and finds the sheets unruffled, the bed made up.

There’s exactly one thing he’s looking for here, and when he finds it, still in Matt’s bag from that night in Josie’s, he has to take a moment to steady himself. The case files are in no danger of getting crumpled or crushed in his own bag, but Foggy holds them in his hands anyway, as though he were cradling them. He’ll put them in his in-tray at work, right where he’ll always see them. 

Everything else, Foggy leaves just the way he finds it. And yet closing the door behind him still feels like laying Matt’s memory to rest.

 

 

 

People ask him for news on Matt. He can’t figure out how they all know, until he steels himself to read whatever story the Bulletin is putting out about Midland Financial Circle. There, amid references to the widely known names of superpowered Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, he finds a tiny mention of their lawyer, who went missing from the police precinct and whose name the reader might recognise from a case with an $11 million settlement that he recently worked pro bono.

The author, Foggy notices, is not Karen Page.

He supposes he must already have a practised poker face from keeping Matt’s secret this long, because it seems like he passes well enough as worried over a missing friend instead of mourning a lost one. Hogarth stops by his office to offer sympathy leave, and Foggy says he would rather keep busy. Marci texts him late at night, but instead of a booty call it’s a welfare check in disguise.

The worst is when his mom calls, and she calls often. He had to tell her eventually, but now he finds he can’t lie to her voice on the other end of the line asking how he’s holding up. Foggy gets as far as telling her that he was the one who put Matt on Jessica’s case before he restrains himself from pouring it all out to her.

Eventually he tells her he can’t be taking personal calls while at work, just so that he’s always safely at home when she confronts him with warmth-comfort-empathy- _family_ , and can let that poker face of his crumble the moment she hangs up.

Time marches on. He doesn’t quite keep up.

 

 

 

On the fifth day, he looks up the address of Matt’s church.

He doesn’t need to explain much. Father Lantom’s face is waxy and wizened with age, and Foggy thinks it knows too much already about grief.

He welcomes Foggy to return the next day, if it’ll help.

It might, and so he does. He meets Karen there, and when she holds out her hope to him, when she stammers and sniffles and says _Maybe_ , Foggy smiles and thinks, alright. He repeats after her: _Maybe_.

 

 

 

It’s hard to be around Claire, but at the same time almost a relief. He can’t look at her without remembering the moment when they brought Matt into the precinct, and as Claire leaned over the couch to check him for injuries, she paused to give Foggy a tired smile and murmur, “Just like old times, huh?” For a spell, it was just like back then; and back then wasn’t perfect, but it was better than now.

So much wasted time with the two of them. It took the ground shaking for Foggy to get out his phone and just call.

But still Foggy sits at the table talking legal matters with her and Luke, running on professionalism and the little, restless sleep he gets. When Claire gets up to see him out, he looks at her and bites back the question, _Do you hurt too?_

_We both loved him. Maybe differently. Maybe not so differently._

At arm’s length was the safe way with Matthew Murdock, but that was never enough for Foggy, and in a way he thinks the same is true for Claire.

 

 

 

Danny Rand, of all people, shows up at his office one day wearing a black suit and tie. Foggy has always been more partial to light greys, but now he wears them almost defiantly, closing the wardrobe doors every morning on the colour of bereavement.

Rand talks intensely and yet rambles, sometimes using turns of phrase that ring of the otherworldly. He finally peters out and leans in for the parting shot. “The last thing he said to me was, ‘Protect my city.’ I think that’s what he would want us — at least me — to keep doing. I don’t know.” 

It’s the same sentiment as Claire said, but coming from Danny like this, the words make Foggy almost angry. Almost. Anger takes some amount of strength to summon, and he’s not sure he has that. He tilts his head slightly to one side. “With all due respect, Mr. Rand. The last thing I said to him was, ‘That’s what family’s for.’ I don’t know why that wasn’t enough for him to climb up out of that hole.”

 

 

 

Things start changing in New York as the months drag by. Alias Investigations is up and running again, if Hogarth’s almost daily exasperated calls to one Jessica Jones are anything to go by. Luke Cage’s name is out on the streets more than ever before, and it’s always said with what seems like equal parts respect and wariness.

Whenever Foggy hears of the reports of a new vigilante out in New York, he reaches for another of the cases he gave Matt, and gets to work, pro bono of course. It’s not a solution. Not long-term. He almost hears himself in Josie’s, convincing Matt to take the files.

In a funny way, he ends up fighting the good fight after all, if sometimes out of guilt and grief more than altruism. (It is surprisingly difficult to feel altruistic when the person who brought it out in you is not only gone, but gone because you let him go.)

Not that he bothers calling Danny Rand to apologise. Really, the further away he stays from these superhero types, the better, he reasons.

So he goes to work, he goes home, and when Matt’s landlord tentatively calls to ask if his apartment can be put on the market soon, Foggy intimidates him into meekness with all the tongue-lashing and legal jargon that law school gave him. After he hangs up, Foggy briefly feels remorseful, but it stops once he remembers the man asking Foggy about returning any spare keys Matt might have had made.

Life goes on and Foggy lets it.

 

 

 

Until out of the blue one day, Karen texts him.

_They’ve finally cleared away all the rubble_ , she says. _No bodies._

And Foggy stares, and takes a deep breath. And then another.

**Author's Note:**

> Rougher work than usual, and my first time writing any of these characters, but I needed to let Foggy grieve since that last episode didn’t.
> 
> Rebloggable tumblr post [here](http://mimosaeyes.tumblr.com/post/164395811647/fandom-the-defenders-title-to-talk-you-home)!


End file.
